George Packer's Blog, page 191

On Bastille Day, a Grieving and Afflicted Nation

The primary sense of the French adjective “affligé ” is “grieving,” or “in distress,” which is undoubtedly the meaning intended by President François Hollande when he addressed his nation, just before four this morning, after rushing from the theatre festival in Avignon to meet with his Cabinet in the capital. “France est affligée,” he said. For the third time in a year and a half, France is grieving a major terrorist attack. This time, the means was a truck; the place was Nice; but the grief, the horror, the fear are the same as before. Eighty-four people, ten of them children, who had gathered with hundreds of others on the Promenade des Anglais to celebrate Bastille Day with a fireworks show over the Mediterranean, have been killed. Two attacks made a pair. Three make a series. Just yesterday, Hollande announced that the state of emergency put in place after November’s attacks in Paris would finally come to an end on July 26th. It has now been extended once again. “France is going to have to live with terrorism,” Prime Minister Manuel Valls said after the Cabinet meeting. “Affligé ” can also be translated as “afflicted,” and, if the word carries with it a sense of cursed inevitability, both its senses have begun to seem equally, horribly valid in France.

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Related:
The Tragic and Unsurprising News from Nice
What We Know About the Attacker in Nice
Another Attack Hits France

Another Attack Hits France

Late on Thursday night, as revellers in the southern French city of Nice were winding down a day of celebrations for La Fête Nationale, or Bastille Day, a large white truck accelerated into crowds of people lingering on the Promenade des Anglais, which runs along Nice’s famous Mediterranean beachfront. The truck barrelled down a two-kilometre stretch before stopping, leaving more than eighty people dead and many others critically wounded. Terror had reappeared in France, yet again.

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Related:
The Tragic and Unsurprising News from Nice
What We Know About the Attacker in Nice
Trumpian Tactics After Nice

Being Honest About Trump

The best show in New York right now may be the Guggenheim’s retrospective of the work of László Moholy-Nagy (pronounced “nadge,” not “nadgy,” a lesson hard learned). Born to a Jewish family in Hungary in 1895, he assimilated all the advances and visual novelties of the early part of the twentieth century, from Russia and Paris alike, and turned them into an adaptable graphic manner that made him one of the indispensable teachers at the Bauhaus, in Dessau, Germany, in the nineteen-twenties, under Walter Gropius. When Hitler came to power, this citizen of cosmopolitanism then emigrated—heading first to Britain, where he made wonderful posters for the London Underground, and eventually and happily to Chicago, where he became one of the key figures in implementing the lessons of modern design that made Chicago a city of such architectural excitement in the mid-century. (Though how much pain and anxiety and sheer disrupted existence are covered over in the words “then emigrated”!)

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Related:
Hillary Clinton and the Opinion Polls: Is It Time to Panic?
Mike Pence and the Trump Veep Sweeps
Will the Iran Nuclear Deal Survive?

Is There Any Hope Left for South Sudan?

Last Thursday, I went to an event on Capitol Hill that marked the fifth anniversary of South Sudan’s independence. Young congressional staffers with smart haircuts mingled in a small, bright room, where an exhibit of photographs from South Sudan had been set up for the occasion. There was an open bar. Among those who offered remarks was Congresswoman Lois Capps, of California, who spoke about the troubled country’s prospects for peace. “The sparks are there,” Capps told the room. “Moving from a violent way of being to a sustainable peace—that’s alive.”

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Related:
The Forgotten Mountains of Darfur
What Putin Has Done for Assad
Comment from the March 7, 2016, Issue

The David Cameron Show

On June 30, 1991, a diary item in the London Sunday Times noted an improvement in Prime Minister John Major’s recent performances in the House of Commons. It picked out an example—the way Major had exposed “a dreadful piece of doublespeak from Tony Blair,” then the Labour Party’s employment spokesman. (Blair said that the “econometric models” for a minimum wage indicated “a potential jobs impact.”) And it identified a hero—David Cameron, a twenty-four-year-old researcher at the Conservative Central Office, and the latest adviser recruited to help Major with Prime Minister’s Questions.

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Related:
The Huge Challenge Facing Theresa May
The Rise of Theresa May and the Decline of British Politics
How the N.B.A.’s Salary Cap Favors Talent-Rich Teams

Hillary Clinton and the Opinion Polls: Is It Time to Panic?

In an age saturated by data and opinion polls, most people know, surely, not to take the results of any one survey too seriously. There are rogue polls that use unreliable methods, statistical outliers that reflect random-sampling errors, and polls that provide accurate snapshots but reflect temporary shifts in sentiment.

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Related:
Being Honest About Trump
Mike Pence and the Trump Veep Sweeps
Will the Iran Nuclear Deal Survive?

Jamie Dimon’s Self-Congratulatory Pay-Raise Announcement Is Good for Working Women

No good deed in American business these days goes unadvertised, and that goes double for the deeds of Jamie Dimon, the high-profile chief of the nation’s largest bank. If you haven’t heard that JPMorgan Chase is raising wages for its lowest-paid workers, it’s not for lack of trying by Dimon and his public-relations staff, who announced it in an Op-Ed in the Times earlier this week.

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When Men Wanted to Be Virile
The Ideal Marriage, According to Novels
“We Support the Music!”: Reconsidering the Groupie

Mike Pence and the Trump Veep Sweeps

On Thursday, the Times reported that Donald Trump’s campaign had “signaled strongly” to Republican officials that Mike Pence, the governor of Indiana, would be his running mate. That has yet to be confirmed—the campaign is not a model of disciplined consistency—but it did come a day after news broke that Trump, his daughter Ivanka, and her husband, Jared Kushner, had stopped by the Indiana governor’s residence, a brick Tudor-style home in Indianapolis, to see Pence, and it seemed as if there might be an early revelation of the identity of Trump’s running mate, which had been promised for Friday. Pence makes a certain amount of sense. On Tuesday night, he had spoken at a Trump rally, inveighing the crowd that “we will unite, we will stand together, we will not rest, we will not relent, until we make this good man our next President.” (By “this good man,” Pence, who endorsed Ted Cruz in the primaries, meant Trump.) Pence is, by many measures, an extreme conservative, who has pushed through state laws restricting reproductive rights and effectively allowing sexual-orientation-based discrimination in the name of religious freedom, and he has opposed increases in the minimum wage. He used a significant part of the five minutes he had at the rally to speak in dark terms about Benghazi. Pence would not assure anyone that Trump is more moderate than he sounds; his purpose, instead, would be to reassure Tea Party Republicans that Trump is radical enough. But Pence is an actual governor of a reasonably sized state, meaning that he is not just some guy whom Trump grabbed off the streets of Manhattan, or poolside at Mar-a-Lago, or in Vegas, as some suspected that his Vice-Presidential choice might be, if only by necessity. What respectable person, the thinking went, would want the job, or fail to feel tarnished by it?

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Being Honest About Trump
Hillary Clinton and the Opinion Polls: Is It Time to Panic?
Will the Iran Nuclear Deal Survive?

Will the Iran Nuclear Deal Survive?

Last month, Boeing signed a landmark agreement with Iran to sell or lease a hundred and nine passenger jets. The mega-deal, worth at least twenty billion dollars, would be the largest sale of American goods to the Islamic Republic since the seizure of the U.S. Embassy, shortly after the 1979 Revolution. Iran Air badly needs new planes to modernize its fleet, which dates back to the Shah’s era. Iranians alternately joke and agonize about mechanical problems that plague the country’s aging aircraft, essential for travel in a country two and a half times the size of Texas.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Being Honest About Trump
Hillary Clinton and the Opinion Polls: Is It Time to Panic?
Mike Pence and the Trump Veep Sweeps

The L.E.D. Quandary: Why There’s No Such Thing as “Built to Last”

The light bulb that has brightened the fire-department garage in Livermore, California, for the past hundred and fifteen years will not burn out. Instead, it will “expire.” When it does, it certainly won’t be thrown out. It will be “laid to rest.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Brexit, Seen from the Top of Europe
The Surprising Relevance of the Baltic Dry Index
The Economic Arguments Against Brexit